From the book
Centuries of Meditations
Thomas Traherne · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordTo annihilate is to reduce to nothing.
- In TraherneTraherne invites the reader to unsuppose heaven and earth and observes that room remains.
- In this edition“Annihilation” is the normalized noun-heading for Traherne's verbs.
- A place to beginThe imagined annihilation of heaven and earth leaves the place they occupied.
Meaning
To annihilate is to reduce to nothing. Here it occurs in a thought experiment: imagined removal of the created world tests whether the space in which it stands can also be removed.
Use in the book
Traherne invites the reader to unsuppose heaven and earth and observes that room remains. Infinity is thereby presented as prior to the finite boundaries supplied by the senses. The experiment does not announce a coming destruction of everything or prescribe self-annihilation as a devotional method. Its work is epistemic and metaphysical: the imagined absence of objects makes the inescapability of their encompassing extent more apparent. The Fifth Century returns to the same test and identifies that extent as a field of treasures, not an empty negation. Annihilation is therefore used to reveal what cannot be annihilated in this act of thought.
Places to read
In this edition
“Annihilation” is the normalized noun-heading for Traherne's verbs. The object removed is the world in imagination, not the praying self.
Source note
Primary text: II.81, V.3. Both references explicitly frame the removal as hypothetical or imaginative.